One of them obviates the ISP collusions as well: VPN. If the tunnel stretches from your computer to the VPN point site, the ISP only sees a stream of encrypted noise.
While yeah, Google does all the grunt-work on the back-end, you still have all the hazards that any SaaS has... and it's not like GMail hasn't had its share of embarrassing security bombs or occasional outages (however brief they may have been) due to either the back-end, or the ISP you use to connect to it.
Well, even though the guy in the article is no sysadmin, he can (if he desired) break out the CSS skills and fix the output to look as pretty as he wants.
Or, do what most companies do who use it and have it plug into a CMS.
Even worse, they've lost mindshare among developers.
Anecdotal example, but my missus saw a tablet ad last night (RIM Playbook, IIRC), and asked about getting one. I replied that we could, but it doesn't have a lot of the games and apps she wants just yet (though they probably will). Her response was pretty instructive about impulse buying: "Well, tell me which ones have them, and we'll get one of those instead."
I talked her out of it (her laptop is less than a year old, FFS...)
While not a "right" (poor choice of words, dude), I would certainly consider the Internet a "utility" that's fast becoming necessary for living in society. Pretty much like electricity, sewage, natural gas, telephone, trash service, and etc.
Sure, you can live without it, but it wouldn't be easy to.
He's partially right, though. Your hypothetical CEO will have a dozen boxes, yeah... but they'll likely be top-o-the-line or relatively new stuff, or something his kid may be tinkering with.
As a former poor person (in my case a struggling student), I remember what it was like to scrape up a box out of spare/cast-off parts, running an OS 'borrowed' from someone else. (props to the owners of nwark.com for selling me the bits, and to the idiots at my former employer at the time for clinging tightly to their Windows 3.0 licenses, but giving me a valid SCO UNIX kit).
Back then, and even now, most poor folk get their computers much the same way - big-hearted geeks bang together boxes and make sure the underprivileged kids have something to do their homework on - and these things aren't going to run the latest/greatest OSes. If you're lucky (like in Free Geek's instance) the boxes have Linux on them, but most of the time there's a copy of Windows ${old} installed because the hardware won't run the latest. Then there's the flea markets, where enterprising folks bang together similarly old boxes, selling them with a copy of Windows-something (maybe XP, maybe 2000, probably 98).
Unless the recipient is a geek (or a budding one), odds are perfect that the OS will never get patched, and that the users have just enough knowledge in using them that they can do some basic bits online, but not really do it safely.
Now sure, your typical CxO with a ton of machinery may be similarly ignorant of patching and such, there are a *lot* more poor folks who are prone to becoming bot-fodder than rich folk who are... especially once you consider that the further you go up the money ladder, the more likely you're going to see something with a stylized fruit stamped on the lid/box/monitor and running OSX.
Sort of... but pr0n adheres to the rest of the business principles too.
See, these corps have a massive stockpile of content that they bought and paid for (either entirely or the rights to broadcast it). Sure, it's almost all tame by Internet standards, but they still have to see some kind of return on investment for them.
You know why we're still seeing Mickey Mouse crap from Disney, or re-releases of certain Disney properties (Snow White, etc) nearly a century after the damned thing was first drawn, right? They still have the copyrights, and by all that is holy they're gonna flog every dollar bill they can out of the things. The pr0n industry works the same way... they have all that money, time, and treasure sunk into the pile they have, and they're kind of stuck with it.
Small aside: Unlike Mickey Mouse or Snow White, the pr0n merchants don't have the luxury of showing the stuff to new generations of kids as parents fondly remember their own memories of it.
If you think the government is competent enough to pull off any kind of serious conspiracy, you've obviously never worked with any government organization...
Yes and no. Let me explain...
The F-117 Stealth Fighter program was only hinted at here and there as early as 1985-86. Project Senior Trend was only officially admitted to in 1987-88, with very few details and a gawdawful fuzzy image. The original research project, Have Blue, never surfaced until after Desert Storm. The first time the public saw the things in any real detail was in 1990. The program itself OTOH began in the early 1970's, and the first aircraft flew in 1981.
We're talking at least 12 years before the thing was considered anything more than an easily-dismissed conspiracy theory, and at least 7 years of operational activity.
I'd say that if the government was dead serious about a project, they could certainly pull it off. All they'd really ahve to do is fold it into some distractive left-right issue and the public would happily not know for a very long time.
Then it must be about Global Warming caused by Man. Those two SUV's they've been running all over the place has destabilized the planet, and runaway greenhouse methane has caused devistating thermal effects.
Laugh all you want, but that would actually be considered a *good* thing if you're looking to terraform Mars.
On a more serious note though, I actually hope to Heaven they present something insanely fascinating to the general public - enough to kick the government in the ass and get Mars human exploration seriously going.
Sadly, I suspect it'll be something only of use to some niche of geologists.
In addition to the regs, I'm just curious as to how the consumer is going to run out and buy things with product names like "Clariion", "Catalyst 6509", "F5 big-ip", "vSphere", "Oracle RAC", "Xeon", and the like. Hell, you'd have a very rough time finding desktops/laptops with SAS drives, dedicated RAID cards, or anything near to using fiber. I also serio
Sure, some things and components can be consumerized, but I'm just not seeing this 'consumerization of IT' being as all-pervasive as TFA implies that it is.
...then again, you usually have to pay those costs anyway (in money or time) every time a new edition of MS Office comes out. This is especially true with MS Office 2003 -> 2007, and is still true enough to count if you go from 2007 -> 2010.
The only real difference is that you pay them in smaller increments more frequently.
As a former prof I had them connect with me there, and it has worked out well ever since. Unlike Facebook, the relationships are strictly professional so there's no implied BS (sexual, favoritism, or otherwise) attached.
Many of my former students (I last taught in 2005) are connected to me on LinkedIn, and it's amazing to watch how they've progressed since they left and set out on their careers. The teaching salary sucked, and the politics sucked even worse (I still know of a few rather petty little individuals at the school who can burn in hell if it were up to me). However, the feeling of watching what were once students with a passion for the craft, now working as successful systems administrators and programmers? That my friend is pretty frickin' awesome. Watching oen of them get on at Juniper as an engineer was especially fulfilling, professionally.
Besides, it benefits them as well, since most still list me as a reference, which especially came in handy when they first began working out there.
Personally I'd rather refuse and sewerage workers, for example, had the best houses for doing the least desirable jobs.
One wee problem with that... everyone suddenly wants to grow up and be a garbageman, and nobody wants to be a doctor.
It's an example of a small but common problem with most socialist schemata, and one that tends to unravel even the best of intentions: the law of unintended consequence.
Props for recognizing the evil of extreme application (e.g. Stalinism/Leninism, etc), but you miss entirely how folks like Stalin got there in the first place... they were elected.
Something else that I've always wondered at, if I may...
Socialism is supposed to be an equitable redistribution of wealth, so that all may share in the benefits, yes? Now, if you consider that the majority of the wealthy got that way by working for it, and have legally (for the sake of argument) amassed their fortunes, under what moral right does one take that away? It may be luck, it may be inheritance, or it may be hard work that got them that pile of money/property/whatever... but it is theirs. Not yours, not mine. To assume otherwise would be to undermine the basis for personal property law, period.
If what you have isn't really yours (which is what any overtly socialist redistribution law basically says), then one of two things begins to happen:
* you decide to chuck it all in and not contribute anything more to society than the absolute minimum required to acheive relative comfort. Nothing more. This in turn reduces overall productivity and drive of society at large. Let someone else take the risks, break their backs, and push hard... sit back and enjoy the results anyway with no additional effort on your part.
* you decide to hide/steal/hoard what you have, and find creative ways to prevent the government from taking it (see also tax loopholes, shelters, etc).
How on Earth does one prevent these things? At least on the capitalist side, evil though it may be, works - it's based on the worst of human emotion: greed and selfishness to promote productivity and progress. Anything else is a bonus.
Personally, everything we've tried as a species to date, well, sucks. They all have downsides, and some of them are garish. OTOH, Until someone comes up with a *workable* society, and one which can prevent the first psychopath to come along from taking over and becoming another Stalin or Mao (or Hitler, or Ivan The Terrible, or Genghis Khan, or Caligula, etc)? Capitalism seems all at once a balance between least evil and most realistic.
I know, I know - let's point at Europe. OTOH, Europe has a lot of advantages here... it (as a whole) doesn't have to fully defend itself militarily (doing that alone would cost more than I think their system overall could bear). The EU, like the US, benefits from trade with nations that don't regard human rights as a necessary thing. There are a lot of reasons why the semi-socialistic governmental systems in the EU does work, but if the whole world operated the same way, the system would very likely collapse.
I'd say Antarctica, since that's about it. OTOH, sadly, I'm willing to wager that since it's under UN purview of the US, Russia, Argentina (seriously), France, and a few others, well...
I'm thinking your only real hope at the point involves a colony on Mars, and even then I'm not so sure that wouldn't get jacked at first opportunity.
Slashdot Mirror
One of them obviates the ISP collusions as well: VPN. If the tunnel stretches from your computer to the VPN point site, the ISP only sees a stream of encrypted noise.
Depends.
While yeah, Google does all the grunt-work on the back-end, you still have all the hazards that any SaaS has... and it's not like GMail hasn't had its share of embarrassing security bombs or occasional outages (however brief they may have been) due to either the back-end, or the ISP you use to connect to it.
Well, even though the guy in the article is no sysadmin, he can (if he desired) break out the CSS skills and fix the output to look as pretty as he wants.
Or, do what most companies do who use it and have it plug into a CMS.
Even worse, they've lost mindshare among developers.
Anecdotal example, but my missus saw a tablet ad last night (RIM Playbook, IIRC), and asked about getting one. I replied that we could, but it doesn't have a lot of the games and apps she wants just yet (though they probably will). Her response was pretty instructive about impulse buying: "Well, tell me which ones have them, and we'll get one of those instead."
I talked her out of it (her laptop is less than a year old, FFS...)
While not a "right" (poor choice of words, dude), I would certainly consider the Internet a "utility" that's fast becoming necessary for living in society. Pretty much like electricity, sewage, natural gas, telephone, trash service, and etc.
Sure, you can live without it, but it wouldn't be easy to.
He's partially right, though. Your hypothetical CEO will have a dozen boxes, yeah... but they'll likely be top-o-the-line or relatively new stuff, or something his kid may be tinkering with.
As a former poor person (in my case a struggling student), I remember what it was like to scrape up a box out of spare/cast-off parts, running an OS 'borrowed' from someone else. (props to the owners of nwark.com for selling me the bits, and to the idiots at my former employer at the time for clinging tightly to their Windows 3.0 licenses, but giving me a valid SCO UNIX kit).
Back then, and even now, most poor folk get their computers much the same way - big-hearted geeks bang together boxes and make sure the underprivileged kids have something to do their homework on - and these things aren't going to run the latest/greatest OSes. If you're lucky (like in Free Geek's instance) the boxes have Linux on them, but most of the time there's a copy of Windows ${old} installed because the hardware won't run the latest. Then there's the flea markets, where enterprising folks bang together similarly old boxes, selling them with a copy of Windows-something (maybe XP, maybe 2000, probably 98).
Unless the recipient is a geek (or a budding one), odds are perfect that the OS will never get patched, and that the users have just enough knowledge in using them that they can do some basic bits online, but not really do it safely.
Now sure, your typical CxO with a ton of machinery may be similarly ignorant of patching and such, there are a *lot* more poor folks who are prone to becoming bot-fodder than rich folk who are... especially once you consider that the further you go up the money ladder, the more likely you're going to see something with a stylized fruit stamped on the lid/box/monitor and running OSX.
Not really. There is competition (NetApp, and a bucket of smaller companies), but thing is, they all act like that now.
As if mugging you for all your lunch money at disk-adding time wasn't enough for EMC, right?
Oh, wait...
Sort of... but pr0n adheres to the rest of the business principles too.
See, these corps have a massive stockpile of content that they bought and paid for (either entirely or the rights to broadcast it). Sure, it's almost all tame by Internet standards, but they still have to see some kind of return on investment for them.
You know why we're still seeing Mickey Mouse crap from Disney, or re-releases of certain Disney properties (Snow White, etc) nearly a century after the damned thing was first drawn, right? They still have the copyrights, and by all that is holy they're gonna flog every dollar bill they can out of the things. The pr0n industry works the same way... they have all that money, time, and treasure sunk into the pile they have, and they're kind of stuck with it.
Small aside: Unlike Mickey Mouse or Snow White, the pr0n merchants don't have the luxury of showing the stuff to new generations of kids as parents fondly remember their own memories of it.
If you think the government is competent enough to pull off any kind of serious conspiracy, you've obviously never worked with any government organization ...
Yes and no. Let me explain...
The F-117 Stealth Fighter program was only hinted at here and there as early as 1985-86. Project Senior Trend was only officially admitted to in 1987-88, with very few details and a gawdawful fuzzy image. The original research project, Have Blue, never surfaced until after Desert Storm. The first time the public saw the things in any real detail was in 1990. The program itself OTOH began in the early 1970's, and the first aircraft flew in 1981.
We're talking at least 12 years before the thing was considered anything more than an easily-dismissed conspiracy theory, and at least 7 years of operational activity.
I'd say that if the government was dead serious about a project, they could certainly pull it off. All they'd really ahve to do is fold it into some distractive left-right issue and the public would happily not know for a very long time.
Then it must be about Global Warming caused by Man. Those two SUV's they've been running all over the place has destabilized the planet, and runaway greenhouse methane has caused devistating thermal effects.
Laugh all you want, but that would actually be considered a *good* thing if you're looking to terraform Mars.
...okay, so we won't see a Zig.
On a more serious note though, I actually hope to Heaven they present something insanely fascinating to the general public - enough to kick the government in the ass and get Mars human exploration seriously going.
Sadly, I suspect it'll be something only of use to some niche of geologists.
heh - forget the "I also serio" part... stupid half-completed thoughts... :)
In addition to the regs, I'm just curious as to how the consumer is going to run out and buy things with product names like "Clariion", "Catalyst 6509", "F5 big-ip", "vSphere", "Oracle RAC", "Xeon", and the like. Hell, you'd have a very rough time finding desktops/laptops with SAS drives, dedicated RAID cards, or anything near to using fiber. I also serio
Sure, some things and components can be consumerized, but I'm just not seeing this 'consumerization of IT' being as all-pervasive as TFA implies that it is.
...then again, you usually have to pay those costs anyway (in money or time) every time a new edition of MS Office comes out. This is especially true with MS Office 2003 -> 2007, and is still true enough to count if you go from 2007 -> 2010.
The only real difference is that you pay them in smaller increments more frequently.
Got one even better: The school/district's Microsoft EA/SA download site. Now they get to set up accounts for pretty much everyone in the district.
So why not have them friend him on LinkedIn?
As a former prof I had them connect with me there, and it has worked out well ever since. Unlike Facebook, the relationships are strictly professional so there's no implied BS (sexual, favoritism, or otherwise) attached.
I disagree.
Many of my former students (I last taught in 2005) are connected to me on LinkedIn, and it's amazing to watch how they've progressed since they left and set out on their careers. The teaching salary sucked, and the politics sucked even worse (I still know of a few rather petty little individuals at the school who can burn in hell if it were up to me). However, the feeling of watching what were once students with a passion for the craft, now working as successful systems administrators and programmers? That my friend is pretty frickin' awesome. Watching oen of them get on at Juniper as an engineer was especially fulfilling, professionally.
Besides, it benefits them as well, since most still list me as a reference, which especially came in handy when they first began working out there.
Sadly, knowing most landlords, I'm thinking the guy probably would, if only because it wouldn't require bolting the thing onto the structure.
Personally I'd rather refuse and sewerage workers, for example, had the best houses for doing the least desirable jobs.
One wee problem with that... everyone suddenly wants to grow up and be a garbageman, and nobody wants to be a doctor.
It's an example of a small but common problem with most socialist schemata, and one that tends to unravel even the best of intentions: the law of unintended consequence.
Props for recognizing the evil of extreme application (e.g. Stalinism/Leninism, etc), but you miss entirely how folks like Stalin got there in the first place... they were elected.
Something else that I've always wondered at, if I may...
Socialism is supposed to be an equitable redistribution of wealth, so that all may share in the benefits, yes? Now, if you consider that the majority of the wealthy got that way by working for it, and have legally (for the sake of argument) amassed their fortunes, under what moral right does one take that away? It may be luck, it may be inheritance, or it may be hard work that got them that pile of money/property/whatever... but it is theirs. Not yours, not mine. To assume otherwise would be to undermine the basis for personal property law, period.
If what you have isn't really yours (which is what any overtly socialist redistribution law basically says), then one of two things begins to happen:
* you decide to chuck it all in and not contribute anything more to society than the absolute minimum required to acheive relative comfort. Nothing more. This in turn reduces overall productivity and drive of society at large. Let someone else take the risks, break their backs, and push hard... sit back and enjoy the results anyway with no additional effort on your part.
* you decide to hide/steal/hoard what you have, and find creative ways to prevent the government from taking it (see also tax loopholes, shelters, etc).
How on Earth does one prevent these things? At least on the capitalist side, evil though it may be, works - it's based on the worst of human emotion: greed and selfishness to promote productivity and progress. Anything else is a bonus.
Personally, everything we've tried as a species to date, well, sucks. They all have downsides, and some of them are garish. OTOH, Until someone comes up with a *workable* society, and one which can prevent the first psychopath to come along from taking over and becoming another Stalin or Mao (or Hitler, or Ivan The Terrible, or Genghis Khan, or Caligula, etc)? Capitalism seems all at once a balance between least evil and most realistic.
I know, I know - let's point at Europe. OTOH, Europe has a lot of advantages here... it (as a whole) doesn't have to fully defend itself militarily (doing that alone would cost more than I think their system overall could bear). The EU, like the US, benefits from trade with nations that don't regard human rights as a necessary thing. There are a lot of reasons why the semi-socialistic governmental systems in the EU does work, but if the whole world operated the same way, the system would very likely collapse.
I'd say Antarctica, since that's about it. OTOH, sadly, I'm willing to wager that since it's under UN purview of the US, Russia, Argentina (seriously), France, and a few others, well...
I'm thinking your only real hope at the point involves a colony on Mars, and even then I'm not so sure that wouldn't get jacked at first opportunity.
I'm just wondering how the hell they're going to be able to tell images with steganographic messages from the ordinary variety.
(the more I think about this, the more I'm forced to concldue that the Pakistani government isn't really thinking this thing through...)
...now I just have to get hold of a few Pakistani bank IP addys, set up some sort of listener, and...
Oh, you thought SSL would still be around after this little law gets into effect?
(obviously I'm kidding, at least about wanting to do any such thing. OTOH, there are quite a few folks who probably wouldn't be kidding at all).
...just hit Ctrl + R and Alt + Shift + P + OMG and they're right there!
On a more serious note, It was probably a goof on their part. The fact that no one noticed until now is pretty strange, though.
Define pornography.
Even the US Supreme Court can't do it objectively - the closest they got was when former Justice Frankfurter said "...I know it when I see it"
Not exactly something you can hinge an objective proof on, is it?
Honestly though, you'd think the guy would stop and think about it before he did it, and at least be prepared for the possible consequences.